PRISONER DVDS (Episodes 1 to 32, of 692)
The Watcher column For the Canberra Times Tuesday 31 October 2006


Look away now if you don't want the old Prisoner TV show theme song stuck in your head. No, seriously, look away. He used to give me roses/I wish he could again/But that was on the outside/And things were different then. Ha. Told you.

I've been watching Prisoner Cell Block H (as it was known in England, where it was a huge hit) because Episodes 1 to 32 have been released in a two-volume set by Shock Entertainment. Set in an Aussie women's prison, Prisoner ran for seven years from 1979, and is now a stark reminder that once upon a time people could get away with a name like Reg Grundy.

It all came tumbling back: Sheila Florance's chainsaw-voiced harridan Lizzie, with her face like a rumpled chenille bedspread (or John Gorton). I'd forgotten that Kerry Armstrong's character Lyn ("But I'm innocent") sobbed through the whole first episode. I'd certainly forgotten the entire character of Franky Doyle, butching it up with a quiff, overalls and an Incredible Hulk act.

Another gift of the writers was the dim-witted Doreen, played by Collette Mann, and deathless dialogue such as, "You dumb old moll", "Go bite your bum", "Well, well, the shearer's pin up", "I'll break your bloody neck", Rack off", "Fair go girls", "All this carry on about a fish-eyed poofter", "Listen you stupid cow", and "Shut up yourself".

No wonder England loved it. Just the way they like to think of us: raucous convict women with fishwife tones and filthy language, with the odd bit of clumsy homo-erotic sadism and plenty of camp capers. (For heaven's sake nobody let on, or they'll all be over here wanting papaya salad and a go on the banana lounge.)

In seven years Prisoner covered issues like rehabilitation, prison reform, whether Meg would ever grow her fringe out, how to build a set for $12.75, and the dynamics of bullying; Prisoner was onto the idea of a Queen Bea and henchgirlies a couple of decades before Rosalind Wiseman's book Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence. (Or in this case, Wentworth Detention Centre.) By next year all 692 episodes will be available on DVD.

Episode One packs it in. There's a suicide, the introduction of all major characters, over-the-top lesbian advances, Kerry Armstrong's hand famously being steamed in the press by "Queen Bea" played by Val Lehman, and Pieta Toppano stabbing Rod Mullinar in the shower after finding him doing the dirty on some hideous brown manchester with a beige valance. I mean, he was doing the dirty with another woman, not the valance, but I only had eyes for the valance. And just think, if Pieta had been more worried about matching linen and less about adultery she wouldn't have had that long career in Australian drama.

In fact most of the crimes in Prisoner are artistic, mostly sartorial (the denim mu-mu and overalls), or tonsorial (the hairstyles pretty much dispensed with the second syllable of the word. The credited stylist, Gilbert Broadway, seems to have been supplied with only a cake of Velvet soap, a series of half-grown out perms and a garden fork). The music was either entirely absent or crashing in suddenly, oogy-boogy style, with some menacing yet inexplicable percussion.

The interiors would make Calvin Klein cry like Kerry Armstrong. There is a preposterous preponderance of brown brick, whether at the prison or an outside shoot.

Inside the prison, old wrought iron beds are supposed to evoke hardship and deprivation. These days you see them in all the homewares mags covered with a lick of Clotted Cream (Dulux ) to denote simplicity and style. Stylists from Inside Out and Vogue Living now stage grudge-match stabbings over vintage Prisoner-style plain grey blankets with a red stripe.

Another very brown interior is the living room of Miss Bennett ("Vinegar Tits"), she of the mouth like a paper cut, where in episode 32 she let her hair down after Bill Hunter pours her a sherry with a meniscus (charmed, she was sure). But of course The Freak (Joan Ferguson), played by Maggie Kirkpatrick, was the most enduring baddie. She and other Prisoner stalwarts have appeared in musicals and pantomimes in England, capitalising on the success of the series. And why not?

We're unlikely ever to revisit the days when an Australian drama employed lots and lots of women, women with no make-up, sporting flat shoes and hair the consistency of scourers. Or characters like Marilyn, the light relief, a wheedling, vacuous, pill-begging nympho with sparkly blue eyeshadow - unless of course you read the Hollywood gossip magazines.

A few episodes of Prisoner make for a fun night in with old pals and a couple of drinks. I have but one quibble with the DVD producers: the word Extra's (yes, with a rogue apostrophe) appears on the main menu. I sentence them to two days in a cell with Doreen and Lizzie, wearing a denim mu-mu, and expecting a little visit from The Freak.

On the inside the roses grow/They don't mind the stony ground/But the roses here are prisoners too/When morning comes around.